Dear Colleague:

Thank you for your interest in applying for National Eye Institute (NEI) support for a conference of scientific meeting.

Grant and cooperative agreement applications for the support of conferences and scientific meetings will be submitted in response to the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) PA-12-212, NIH Support for Conferences and Scientific Meetings (R13/U13) http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-12-212.html. Applications will be received through electronic submission to Grants.gov using the SF424 (R&R) application form.

Conference grant applications may be submitted by a wide variety of eligible institutions, including non-academic organizations. Thus for some conference grants, the PD/PI is not an employee of the applicant institution/organization, while for other conference grants the PD/PI is an employee of the applicant organization. (It is important to note that only the named PD/PI will be able to access information about the application, such as the priority score and Summary Statement.) Therefore, for electronic receipt the applicant institution/organization has the following two options:

a) The applicant institution/organization can name a PD/PI who is an employee of the organization/institution and register that individual in the eRA Commons.

b) The applicant institution/organization may designate an “affiliated” individual as the PD/PI. In this case, the applicant organization will need to officially register this PD/PI in the Commons. Following are the steps to affiliate a PD/PI:

The PD/PI gives his or her Commons user ID and email address to the administrator of the new institution. The email address must be the one that is contained in the Personal Profile for this PD/PI.

The institutional Administrator logs into the Commons (The administrator can be the Signing Official, Administrative Official, or the Accounts Administrator)

The Administrator enters the Commons User ID and Email address into the appropriate fields and clicks “Submit”. Note: The account cannot have any other roles attached to it other than that of PD/PI.

Please note that applicants are required to submit a copy of the PDF file from the NEI Research Resources Officer with the letter documenting advance permission to apply. This documentation will need to be added to any other cover letter information and attached as a single PDF file to the agency-specific SF424 (R&R) application component titled “PHS 398 Cover Letter File”.

We welcome your questions and comments. Please send general questions and comments to the NEI Office of Science Communications, Public Liaison, and Education. Technical questions about this website can be addressed to the NEI Website Manager.